A Change of Climate: A Novel (35 page)

“I’ve heard,” Anna said, “of women who came home to find a note on the table. Until then, they had no inkling.”

“Had you an inkling?”

Anna smoothed her hair back. It was very smooth already. Ginny thought, she seems to be the one in charge here.

“As I see it,” Ginny said, “you have three courses before you. When you choose which to take, you must bear in mind that this affair of his will very likely not last.” Anna raised an eyebrow. “Oh, you know my situation,” Ginny said. “It was different with me. Felix and Emma, they were old flames.”

“You don’t have to talk about it.”

“Why else are you here?” Ginny lit another cigarette. “Really, Anna, I don’t mind. I know you’re here because—well, whatever did Daniel tell you?”

“He gave me a version of your life that was different from the one I knew. I’m sorry. It is an intrusion on your privacy.”

“Bugger that,” Ginny said. “It’s a relief to talk about it. More gin?”

“Why not? Ralph’s not here to see me.”

“He stopped you drinking?”

“Not exactly. It was more the weight of tradition. Our families. And his uncle, Holy James, the total abstainer. Who’d seen otherwise competent missionaries go out to the tropics and be pickled in spirits within the decade.”

“Yes, I remember James—whatever happened to him?”

“He went abroad again. Back to Africa. After, you know … a year or two after we came home.”

“But he was old! Wasn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“And then?”

“He died.”

“Of course. Well …” Ginny breathed smoke. “You see, with Ralph, you’ve been married all these years, and now you’re in a position to renegotiate. I say it won’t last, because they don’t— these affairs between men of fifty, and young girls.”

“She’s hardly that.”

Ginny looked hard at her. “Comparatively.”

“Oh yes—comparatively.”

“You see, there’s a pattern to it. These men of fifty—they never fall for women of their own age, you notice. It’s always someone who makes them feel young.”

“How comforting to be part of a pattern,” Anna said. “I always wanted to be.” It struck her, then, that Ginny did not know the course of her life, not in any detailed way; that if she had ever known, she had forgotten it. “But Mrs. Glasse,” she said. “I haven’t an idea of what her attractions might be. And so, I have no idea how to combat them.” She picked up her drink. “Well now, Ginny, you said there were three courses I could take.”

“Yes. Bearing in mind that it won’t last, you can negotiate with him. You can ask him to live with you and let him see her when he wants. That may prolong the agony—it did for me. Or, you can let him stay with her for the while, and sit it out—keep your home and finances intact, and prepare for a return to normal on the day he says he wants to come back.” Ginny ground her cigarette out. “Or, of course, you can give him the push.”

Anna shook her head. “I’m not patient, Ginny. I couldn’t sit it out. What do you do, while you’re sitting it out?”

Ginny reached for another cigarette, flipped it into her mouth. “This,” she said. She flicked a nail at her glass. “And this. Alternatively, you can count your blessings. Think of people less fortunate than yourself. Cripples.” She smiled. “Women who work in launderettes.”

The child had been scraped up off the streets. She was drowsy and confused, her speech slurred, her eyes unfocused. Her mouth was bleeding. She hadn’t a penny to her name.

She remembered jabbing a fist out at some woman who leaned over her; it was a face she didn’t know, and that was enough to provoke her. Then the rocking motion of a vehicle, an interval of nothing: and a rush of light and air that hit her—like a drench of cold water—as they carried her from the ambulance into casualty. She bent her arm and laid it over her eyes, to protect herself from this brightness and cold; a nurse saw the scars on her inner arm. “What’s this?” she said. “Silly girl!”

That was how they talked to her. As if she were two years old and yet at the same time a piece of filth off the street, something they had got on their shoes. They shook her to try to keep her awake, to make her talk. They tried to keep her eyes open. This tortured her, and she didn’t know why they wanted to do it. She wanted just to slump on the hard hospital trolley, to melt into it: to give way, to give way to the covering darkness, to pull over her head the blanket of death. “What was it?” they shouted. “Tell us what you’ve taken. You silly girl! Nobody can help you if you don’t help yourself.”

Their voices were very loud and hard, the edges of their words shivered and blurred; but she could hear whispers too, nurses talking behind screens. “I never could have patience with suicides.”

Her head lolled. To buy some peace for herself she gave them the address—or an idea of the address—at first able only to describe a house set in fields, with many staircases and people, many huts and sheds and small buildings around it, so that they said, “Some kind of camp, could it be?” and for a while there was a respite. A policewoman in uniform appeared at the end of the bed. When she saw this she tried to climb out. “Your drip!” a nurse yelled, and another nurse and the policewoman dumped her back into the bed and held her there while they rearranged the stand and the tube they had put in her arm.

“Why don’t you let us help you?” the nurse said. “Just your name, my dear.” But there was no love in the words, no my dear about it.

“Where’s my clothes?” she said.

“Why? You don’t want them. You’re not going anywhere, are you?”

“That T-shirt’s not mine,” she said. “That pink top, it doesn’t belong to me. You had no right to take it.”

She meant to say that they had done wrong, double-wrong, taking from her what she didn’t even own.

But one thought disconnected itself, unplugged itself from the next, and her words slid out through bubbles of spittle that she felt at the corner of her mouth but was too weak to wipe away. One of the nurses mopped her mouth for her, with an abrupt efficient swipe: as if she were not aware that her lips were part of a living being. Suddenly, memory flooded her; this is what it is like to be a baby. You are a collection of parts, not a person, just a set of bones in flesh, your hands grasping and your mouth sucking and gaping; you are a collection of troubles, of piss and dribble and shit.

Her mouth stretched open for air. She was sick; she was sick and sick and sick. First on the blanket, which they dragged away from her legs, then in a metal bowl which she held herself, so hard that the rim dug into her fingers. The nurses stood by approving of this, of the awful corrosive fluid that poured out, the stained water and yellow bile.

For a time after that she lay back stiffly, her arms wrapped across her body. Perhaps she slept. Then the door opened, rousing her, and Mr. Eldred came in. He stood at the end of her bed without speaking, just looking at her. She looked at him back for a minute, then turned her head away. There was a crack in the plaster of the wall. She studied it. Eventually he spoke. “Oh, Melanie,” he said. “Whatever next?”

Sometimes she woke up and the man was there. Sometimes she slept. Sometimes she woke up and he was not there. She shouted to a nurse—her voice surprising her, issuing from her mouth like some flapping, broken-winged pigeon—and asked where he had gone, and a nurse said, “He has more than you to attend to, Miss.”

She raised her hand, the one without the drip, and scrubbed her wrist back and forth across her forehead. She looked down at her legs, lying like dead white sticks; her body was hot and clammy, so she kicked the covers off, and then, tight-lipped, they dragged them back again. “Look, I want to talk to you,” she shouted to a nurse, but as soon as she started to talk she began to cry, a wailing sort of crying she’d never done before, which hurt her throat and made her have to blow her nose, and made her breath stick in her throat as if it were something she’d swallowed, a bone. “Please,” the nurse said. “Do you think you’re the only patient we have to attend to? Have some consideration for others—please!”

The thing it was necessary to say was where she’d got the T-shirt from; that she’d taken it out of a basket in the bathroom, where somebody had said dirty clothes went, but that was all the same to her, all her clothes were neither clean nor dirty but just what she wore, and it seemed to her the ones in the basket were just that, clothes. When the policewoman came back, she tried to ex-plain it to her. “Not out of her bedroom,” she said. “I never went in there.”

The woman frowned. “I’m sorry, darling, I don’t know what you’re on about. What T-shirt is this, then?”

“Shoplifting,” a nurse breathed. “I’ll just bet you.”

“Look, just don’t go on about it,” the policewoman said. “All right? I’m sure it’ll just be forgotten about, if you don’t keep on.”

Behind the screens the nurse said, “As if that were all she had to concern herself about.”

“She had a bag of clothes,” the policewoman explained. “New ones. That’ll be it. Couple of hours before she collapsed somebody saw her selling them.”

“Well, where did she get them from, you wonder? And did nobody do anything about it?”

“You see all sorts of things on the streets,” the policewoman said. “The first thing you learn in this job is to expect no assistance from passersby.”

Time passed; she could not guess how much. The nights were bright and full of action, full of squeaking wheels in the corridors and the squeaking of shoes as nurses ran. Days were indistinguishable. She didn’t know the day of the week, not that she ever had. They put her in a side room, said, “I should say you’re privileged, Miss.” She heard diagnoses, part diagnoses of her condition. Can’t or won’t eat. Can’t or won’t remember. Their voices were hard and bright, like knives.

She heard nurses gossiping, talking about an abortion, one that had breathed. Her own breathing became painfully tight, as if she were trying not to draw attention to herself, trying not to take up space. In the hospital there were sluices and incinerators. She lay in the ward’s half day, half night, deciding when and how to run.

Ralph drove to Blakeney. Ginny let him in, twittering nervously and offering him a drink. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’d like to talk to Anna alone, I suppose that’s all right with you?”

Ginny waved him toward her drawing room. The shock of the vast window: the gray day flooded in, its monochromes intermingled, the dun mud of the creek and the shiver of gulls’ wings.

Anna sat with her back to the light. She was wearing a gray dress, and he noticed it because it was not hers; it was too short, too narrow, and even as he came in she was pulling at its neckline, straining it away from her white throat. Seeing him, she let her hand settle on her thigh. “I hardly recognize you,” he said.

“We have that in common.” He understood that she had been crying. Her voice was coarsened, blurred, at her elbow was a glass of dissolving ice.

At first, she didn’t speak. The moment spun itself out. Her eyes rested on his face. Then she spoke all at once, in a rush.

“Ralph, I want you to know that I don’t want anything. The house, everything, you can have it. At first—last night—I didn’t think that. I thought, this woman, whatever backwoods berry-picking life she’s been leading, I don’t want her to improve her position at my expense. But now I realize—”

“Anna, you’re exhausted,” he said.

“Yes. But I think now, what’s the point, what’s the point of hanging on?”

“You give me up, Anna?”

“What choice have I?”

“Every choice.”

“Every choice? I don’t think you will indulge me while I consider them.”

“It’s not a matter of indulgence. You have every choice. Trust me.”

“You have no right to ask that, Ralph. Of all the things you could ask, you have least right to trust.”

He nodded. “I see that. I suppose I meant, trust me for the sake of the past, not the present.”

“I shall have to go back home for a little while. A few weeks. To work out where I am going to go after that, and what’s to happen about a school for Rebecca. So what I want—I want to make this agreement with you—”

“Anna, this is not what I meant.” Ralph was panic-stricken. “You can’t just—reinvent yourself like this, people don’t do it. I thought we should sit and talk—”

“Too much of that,” Anna said. “So much talk, but here we are.” Again her hand went to her throat, trying to pull the neckline of Ginny’s dress away from her skin. “I want to make this agreement. That you will come home and get your things and do it all at once. I mean that you should get yourself organized and move out. I don’t want sordid to-ing and fro-ing with suitcases.”

“So that’s the decision you have made?”

“That’s the first decision I have made.”

Ralph looked away. “I wish you would get back into your own clothes.”

“I didn’t bring any.”

“Why did you come here?”

“Ginny’s a friend.”

“Ginny is pernicious.”

“Oh—because she gave me a drink, and a dress to wear?”

“This is childish. A childish conversation.”

“True. And you, of course, are acting like a mature man.”

“You must not think,” Ralph said, “you must not think that this was some stupid fling.”

“Oh, wasn’t it? I see, I do see. Your emotions were engaged, were they? Your poor little emotions.” That first rush of energy had died out of Anna’s voice; it was low, toneless now. “Then let me congratulate you. You’ve found the love of your life, have you? Well, go to her then. Quick about it!”

“I don’t want to go. I want you to forgive me, if you can. That’s what I came here to ask you, but you didn’t give me a chance.”

She shook her head. “Ginny has been talking me through it, a woman’s options. A woman in middle life, whose husband flits off to something more juicy. But I don’t feel that I can consider these options, I feel that I’m not going to sit in the house, waiting and hoping. I have done it before, and I’m tired of it.”

Ralph sprung up from his chair. He wanted to cross the room to her, but he did not dare. “I’m not asking you to wait. Or hope. Or anything. Just talk to me, let’s talk it through. I wanted to explain my feelings—”

“Why should you think I might want them explained?”

“Because it is usual. In a marriage. To talk about feelings.”

“Oh yes. Perhaps.
In
a marriage.”

“Listen to me,” Ralph said. “There is nothing to be gained by bandying words and freezing me out. I wanted to tell you what had happened, I wanted to be truthful with you—and if you can’t forgive me now, which I well understand, I wanted to go away with the hope that you might forgive me—in time.”

“I’m no good at forgiving.” She looked down at her nails. “Don’t you know that? It doesn’t matter if the action is to be deferred. I can’t do it. The years pass and they don’t make a difference. I know, you see. Because I’ve been betrayed before.”

“It’s useless, then,” he said. “If you will insist on seeing this as some kind of continuation or extension of what happened to us twenty years ago.”

“All my life has been a continuation of it.” She raised her eyes. “I know you have put it behind you. You have been able to say, let us not hate, we are reasonable people. Even though what happened was not reasonable. Even though it was barbaric and foul.” She put her hand to her throat again. They had hanged Felicia.

“You were not the only person betrayed,” he said. “I was betrayed too.”

“Not so much. After all, you opened the door to them.”

“Yes. Is it the action of a human being, to throw that in my face now?”

“There is no limit to what human beings will do. We know that, don’t we? There is no depth to which human beings won’t sink. And I’ve never claimed to be more than human. Though you would have appreciated it, if I had been.”

He looked as if the breath had been knocked out of him. Sat down on one of Ginny’s fringed Dralon armchairs; on the edge. Wiped his hand across his face.

When evening came Anna and Ginny put on their coats and went to walk by the quay. The water was flat, motionless. The small boats were perched on it, like toys on a steel shelf.

“How are you now?” Anna asked her. “About Felix?”

“You mean him dying?”

She really is faintly stupid, Anna thought. “Yes, that’s what I mean.”

“Well, you get to a stage where you don’t think about it every day,” Ginny said. “At least, so I’m told. I haven’t reached it yet.”

Anna saw the bulk of the Blakeney Hotel, a ship of flint, bobbing at the quayside and showing its lights. She heard the evening complaints of cattle from the salt marshes, and the competing snicker of sheep. She said, “I don’t understand this thing about forgiveness, Ginny. You hear about these people in Ireland. Their husband’s been shot, or their children blown apart. And you have some woman propped up before the cameras, saying oh, I forgive the terrorists. Why forgive them? I don’t.”

“I thought you were religious,” Ginny said: her tone careful, distant.

“I’m barely a Christian. Never was.”

Somewhere in Ginny’s mind a door opened, just a crack; was there not some story, long ago, about a dead child?

“Why don’t we drop in to the hotel for a drink?” she said.

“A drink, for a change!” Anna said. “Yes, why not?”

They sat in the bar for half an hour, sipping gin among pseudomariners. Evening light on blazer buttons: early diners tripping in to their shellfish and game. “I could ask if they had a table,” Ginny said.